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Mes: septiembre 2014

We are glad to announce that WaveEngine 1.4 (Dolphin) is out! This is probably our biggest release until now, with a lot of new features.

New Demo

Alongside with the 1.4 Release of Wave Engine, we have published in our GitHub repository a new sample to show all the features included in this new version. In this sample you play Yurei, a little ghost character that slides through a dense forest and a haunted house.

Some key features:

The new Camera 2D is crucial to follow the little ghost across the way.

One of the major improvements in 2D games using Wave Engine is the new Camera 2D feature.

With a Camera 2D, you can pan, zoom and rotate the display area of the 2D world. So from now on making a 2D game with a large scene is straightforward. Additionally, you can change the Camera 2D projection:

Orthogonal projection. Camera will render objects 2D uniformly, with no sense of perspective. That was the most common projection used.

Now it’s easy to make a Parallax Scrolling effect using Perspective projection in Camera 2D, you only need to properly set the DrawOrder property to specify the entity depth value between the background and the foreground.

This new release comes with and extesion library called WaveEngine.ImageEffects, this allows users an easy mode (one line of code) to add multiple postprocessing effects to their games. The first version of this library has more than 20 image effects to improve the visual quality of each development. All these image effects have been optimized to work in real time on Mobile devices. Custom image effects are also allowed and all image effects in the current library are published as OpenSource.

In this new release we have improved the integration with Spine Skeletal 2D animation tool to support Free-Form deformation(FFD).This new feature allows you to move individual mesh vertices to deform the image.

One of the most requested features by our users was the implementation of a real Parent / Child transform relationship. Now, when an Entity is a Parent of another Entity, the Child Entity will move, rotate, and scale in the same way as its Parent does. Child Entities can also have children, conforming an Entity hierarchy. Transform2D and Transform3D components now have new properties to deal with entity hierarchy:

LocalPosition, LocalRotation and LocalScale properties are used to specify the transform values relative to its parent.

Position, Rotation and Scale properties are used now to set global transform values.

Transform2D inherited from Transform3D component, so you can deal with 3D transform properties in 2D entities.

We have been working on rewrite all our tools using GTK#to get these tools available on Windows, MacOS and Linux. We want to offer the same development experience for all our developer regardless their OS.

Within this WaveEngine version we have also improved the developer workflow, because one of the most tedious tasks when working in multiplatform games is the assets management. So with this new workflow all these tasks will be performed automatically and transparently to developers, we obtaining amazing benefits:

Reduce development time and increased productivity

Improved the process of porting to other platforms

Isolated the developer from managing WPK files

All our samples and quickstarter have been updated to this new workflow, Github repository.

After many developers requests we have started to create a Scene Editor tool, We are excited to announce that we are already working on it. It will be a multiplatform tool so developers will be able to use this tool from either Windows, MacOs, or Linux.

Using Wave Engine in your applications built on Windows Forms, GTKSharp and WPF

Within this new version we want to help every developer using Wave Engine on their Windows Desktop Applications, like game teams that need to build their own game level editor, or University research groups that need to integrate research technologies with a Wave Engine render and show tridimensional results. Right now, located at our Wave Engine GitHub Samples repository, you can find some demo projects that show how to integrate Wave Engine with Windows Forms, GtkSharp or Windows Presentation Foundation technologies.